History of the German National Library of Medicine

<h1>History of the German National Library of Medicine and Its Collection</h1>

• 1908: Founding of the "Library of the Academy of Practical

Medicine" (“Bibliothek der Akademie für praktische Medizin”) in Cologne

In its role as a hospital library, it worked on behalf of its doctors to coordinate the numerous collections of books and periodicals held by libraries at existing hospitals and institutions.

 

Stock: 75 journals and 5,000 books of a predominantly clinical/practical nature, later increased to more than 30,000 books thanks to various donations (Wilhelm Waldeyer, Hugo Seemann, Bernhard Bardenheuer).

• 1920: Integration in Cologne's newly-formed University and City

Library as Dept. 3

Shifting of primary focus to journals and foreign literature.

 

Stock by the end of the Second World War: 500 journals and 145,000 volumes (books and bound journals). The library’s stocks remained almost entirely undamaged during the war.

Numerous acquisitions of stocks from other libraries and book collections:

- among other sources, 9,000 books from the "Library of the Lower Rhine Association of Public Health Care" (“Bibliothek des Niederrheinischen Vereins für öffentliche Gesundheitspflege”) (1924),

- the medical stocks from the library of the Cologne collector Ferdinand Franz Wallraf and the former Cologne Grammar School Library on a permanent loan basis (1930) and

- the library of the "Cologne General Medical Association of 1871" (“Kölner Allgemeinen Ärztlichen Verein von 1871”) (1933).  

 

The "Medical Department of the Cologne University and City Library" had now become one of the largest medical libraries in Germany.

 

• 1949: German Research Foundation (DFG) entrusts the Medical

Department library with collecting the special subject area of Medicine, thereby granting it nationwide responsibility for the Federal Republic of Germany.

 

Stock in 1963: more than 1,100 journals and 250,000 volumes.

With the DFG’s support, the library intensified its efforts to collect foreign literature, particularly from the Anglo-American sphere.

 

• 1964: Science Council recommends expanding the "Medical

Department of the University and City Library" into the "National Library of Medicine" due to the ever increasing need for medical literature in universities, industry and non-university research institutions. The DFG then drew up a report, in 1967, which endorsed this plan and arranged for its funding.  

 

• 1969: Founding of the "National Library of Medicine" (ZB MED).

Geared towards the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI), which was also founded in Cologne in the same year, with a substantial expansion of its collection profile.

 

Mandate: to acquire medical literature as "comprehensively as possible" in its role as the "Federal Republic of Germany's central specialist medical library".

 

Collection profile: from anatomy and anthropology to urology and virology, covering all medical disciplines and foundation subjects, public healthcare, nursing, hospital facilities, pharmacology, and environmental medicine. In recent years, expansion into the fields of cell biology and molecular biology, as well as unconventional directions in medicine.

 

Languages: German-speaking and English-speaking areas are particularly heavily represented in the book collections. Journals are acquired from all around the world, in all languages and from all countries, not least due to utilisation in the large medical databases.

 

Current stock: 15,000 journals, 50,000 microforms and 900,000 books

 

The ZB MED now ranks as the world's second largest medical library.

 

• 1994: Name changed to "German National Library of Medicine"

Expansion of stocks to encompass a broad spectrum of new electronic media: diskettes, CD-ROMs, microfilm editions, electronic books and journals, full-text databases and multimedia products.

As well as integrating these new types of publication, the ZB MED is constantly monitoring both developments in medicine and its customers' expectations (doctors, researchers, industry, scientists) and adjusting its collections accordingly.

 

• 2001: Expansion of the ZB MED and its Specialist Library in Bonn

to cover the areas of nutrition and the environment.

 

• 2003: Expansion of the ZB MED to encompass the field of

agricultural sciences (also housed in the Specialist Library in Bonn)

 

For a list of the subject areas we currently collect, please check out our  Collection Profile.